Communication between people has been increasing rapidly. People are constantly communicating with each other by using e.g. telephones, mobile terminals or personal computers for communication. A substantial amount of this communication can be attributed to more than 6 billion mobile terminal users. Conventional voice calling is the most known application among mobile terminal users. There are roughly 3000 billion voice calls annually carried out by the mobile terminal users.
Nowadays, the mobile terminals are used for many different types of communication such as communicating with work colleagues and clients as well as communicating with family and friends. A certain amount of calls is also used for other purposes, such as e.g. marketing and customer relationship management.
In today's busy environment, when being called to, the mobile terminal user would like to know who is calling. Furthermore, the mobile terminal user would like to know from which organization or association the call is made. This is important for the mobile terminal user so that he/she is able to get some time for mental preparation before answering the call.
Often the communicating parties want easy and effective communication, i.e. the parties want to minimize the time wasted and prefer the communication to be easy, fast and “to-the-point”. Therefore also the person originating the call would benefit from that the called mobile terminal user were able to know more about the person calling and were able to prepare himself/herself prior to answering the call.
Also the caller may want to know that he or she has actually called to the person intended. Technical means for ascertaining the called party identity is not available during a voice call that utilizes voice call procedures of the known prior art. In some intimate context this could be very important to both parties i.e. to the caller person and to the called person.
Some measures are not possible to be accomplished during the conventional voice call. Therefore, in some cases at least one of the parties of the voice call has to establish a data transfer connection to the one and same party via a data communication network. This may be frustrating if that kind of an operation recurs very often.
Some solutions are known in the art for overcoming the above mentioned problem of knowing more about the caller of the incoming call. A standard solution is to look for the number of the incoming call from the address book of the mobile terminal receiving the call. Many of the numbers of the incoming callers may typically be stored in the address book of the receiving mobile terminal. However, this does not satisfy the user if the number of the caller is not in the address book.
Furthermore, there are prior art service solutions, where a link is provided to an external phonebook for checking the name of the number holder of the incoming call. These prior art service solutions list out typically only the name of the caller. That kind of a solution does not satisfactorily indicate to the receiving mobile terminal user from which organization or association the call is made.
One solution for solving the above mentioned problem is disclosed in patent application EP 1 744 526. FIG. 1 depicts the system of EP 1 744 526. In the depicted system the mobile client 11, the caller party A, initiates a voice call 1 to the mobile client 12 of the called party B. The voice call establishment is accomplished via some telecommunications network 10 that may comprise wired and wireless network elements. The communication system of EP 1 744 526 comprises also a library server 13 that has an access 13a to a library database 14 to which some personalized details of users of the mobile client devices are saved.
In the communication system according to EP 1 744 526 the calling mobile client device 11 of the calling party A initiates a call establishment to the mobile client device 12 of the called party B. The initiated call 1 is transferred to the called mobile client 12 through the communications network 10. When the called mobile client 12 gets the call initiation message, the receiving mobile client 12 requests for data (reference 2) associated with the calling party 11 from the library server 13 through a communications network 10. The library server 13 fetches (reference 13a) data associated with the calling party A from the database 14. The library server sends (reference 3) data associated with the calling party A to the mobile client 12. The mobile client 12 shows on its display the received data concerning the called party A, when it alarms the called party B.
The depicted system has following drawbacks. In some situations the mobile client 12 of the called party B may be connected at the call initiation moment to a wireless network where data cannot be transferred during the established voice call. One example is a GSM network and/or GSM device that usually is not supporting GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) data transfer at that time.
A second drawback of the depicted system of EP 1 744 526 is that only the called party B has the power to decide if it receives data associated with the calling party A. The decision is always made in the mobile client 12 of the called party B before a request 2 to the library server 13 is made. It is also true that all calling parties A do not have their caller data saved in the database 13. If it happens very often that any caller data concerning a calling party A cannot be found, the called party B may bypass the caller data fetching loop totally. That kind of a situation is probable if the experienced delay for the called end user turns out to be too long. In that case also the user data of those caller parties A that have saved their user data descriptions in database 14 cannot be brought on the display of the called mobile client 12.
There are also some prior art MMS service solutions (Multimedia Messaging Service), where the calling party is provided with a possibility to have an MMS message linked to the call. One of the disadvantages associated with MMS service solutions is that these services are typically linked with the MMS standard and they do not provide enough possibilities and flexibility in personalization of the call message. Furthermore, one disadvantage in said prior art MMS service solutions is that, when realised, the visible delay for the end user turns out to be too long. These said prior art service solutions are included in the call setting procedure which increases their complexity and makes them somewhat difficult to manage. Typically these kinds of service solutions also require some particular MMS capabilities from the calling party equipment.